SlideMagic Blog

This describes my usual creative process. You start off with digesting a story at a high level, and things seem clear - although most of the times presented wrong. Then you dig in, start asking questions, go all the way to the very bottom of detail, and things are confusing, ambiguous and not clear. After this stage it is time to rise up again to come to a new high level story. And that high level story is most of the times a completely different one from the first version that we started off with.

A parallel can be drawn to financial analysis: you start with a napkin, build a very detailed spreadsheet, and end with an extremely simplified chart (that looks different from the napkin you started off with).

As a management consultant (or a scientist) you had to crack a very difficult issue: what approach to take to solve a particular problem or get to some insight. Once the approach was nailed, the rest of the work was relatively easy (sweat work rather than think work).

It is tempting to use this thought process as a structure of your presentation. Here is the problem, here is the theory behind it, here is our methodology, here is the data analysis, and finally, here is the conclusion. Most scientific papers are structured this way and kids get taught this approach in school/university.

This works if your audience also consists of management consultants and scientists. In most other cases, just talk about the problem you tried to solve (the actual one, not the approach issue) and then go straight to the conclusion and results.

Often, I see that the slide deck is just a confidence booster for the presenter of a new story. Having those beautifully designed slides behind you makes sure you will not s**w up. Over time, you become more and more confident in delivering the story, your slides get bolder and more minimalist, until finally, you do not need them anymore.

But, without that slide deck on day 1, you would not have gotten to that level of story telling…

An aspiring presentation designer asked me this question. “You really are confident that you can grasp any story that is thrown at you (scientific, financial)?” I answered positive.

Yes, I have some background in business, engineering, and financial analysis, but there are cases where I do not get it the first time around. I do not think that that is my problem though, if I do not get it, the audience of reasonably intelligent people will not either. Time to try to explain it to me again.

I am not embarrassed to ask stupid questions, and never say that I got it when I did not.

That is what many experienced executives say. It is true that not every point your want to make in a presentation needs to be spelled out in a slide. But sometimes the crucial message of a presentation gets omitted.

Some slide that has been used for a thousand times (often a bad one) is the trigger for the experienced presenter to tell her story that has been told a thousand times before. It looks like a slide presentation, but in practice the presenter is telling the story without slides.

In a focussed one-on-one meeting, the message gets across. It might get lost in a presentation for a big audience, and it will for sure not be communicated when sending the deck by email without verbal explanation.

A really fundamental point in your presentation deserves a slide. It often takes an outsider to point out to you what that point is. “Hey, that is sort of obvious, I can talk to that!” Not really.

You can simply describe your product/app with a dry feature list. Better: you can use case examples to show how things work in practice. The best approach: use one case example/story throughout your entire presentation:

• You can go into a bit more depth to set the challenge your product tackles
• You do not need to reintroduce the case example all the time, we already know the full background of the main character in your story
• You can show that your product can be used on multiple occasions at different times of the day
• You can also introduce smaller features using the framework of the overall story
• You can instantly create a consistent look and feel across your presentation

I get this suggestion a lot from clients who are concerned with the amount of slides in their decks. I usually push back, collapsing two messages into one (more busy) slide does not shorten the presentation.

When writing (without tinkering font size or margins): time = page count, when presenting: time = story.

If there is a very important message in your story, there is no need to make it on every page in your presentation. Fifteen half-baked bullet points are not as powerful as one carefully crafted slide that drives your message home. Added side benefit: you can make your presentation even shorter!

When pitching to a new client, you often carry a deck of slides with you to cover your uncertainty. “At least I can lecture about X or Y and flood the prospective client with facts”. In the end what makes the sale is not the lecture about you, but the dialogue about the client’s issues.

It also works for me and my presentation design business. A quick email conversation when a prospect asks “What do you charge and send us a link to an example of your work” is less likely to convert into a project then a half an hour conversation about the actual story.

Most of the times, clients think they are looking for slide make-overs, while actually they need a story redesign. Stating: “I redesign stories and look here is where I have done it 500 times before” does not make the same impression as doing the actual thing on the fly.

In the beginning of your presentation, the audience is trying to figure you out, and is forming a broad framework about what it is you are talking about. Watch out not to go off on a tangent too early in your story, your audience is not ready for it. Later in your talk, once the overall framework is established, it is perfectly fine to go on a little deviation.

For those interested: in geometry, the tangent is a line or surface that just touches a curve. After the connecting point both lines separate (Wikipedia).